The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City this week has sued Phil Ivey – one of the most recognizable of the players on the World Series of Poker on television – for $9.8 million from allegedly fraudulent winnings during a series of visits to the casino in 2012.

The casino also is suing Gemaco, Inc., the mini-baccarat playing card company whose cards manufactured for Borgata allegedly contained an imperfection that Ivey exploited to win the money.

The suit alleges that the some of the cards made by Gemaco turned out to not have a perfectly symmetrical design on the back of the card. Ivey, the suit claims, was able to figure out what the first card to be dealt was – giving him a significant advantage over the “house,” or casino.

Ivey contacted Borgata officials in April 2012 and sought to play mini-baccarat for up to $50,000 a hand on the $1 million he would wire to the casino, according to the suit. Given Ivey’s high-roller status, the casino agreed to his request that he would be given a private area in which to play as well as provided with a card dealer who spoke Mandarin Chinese. The casino also agreed to let Ivey bring a guest to the table as well, to provide one purple deck of Gemaco playing cards for use, and for an automatic card shuffling device to be used.

According to the suit, “The pretext given for some of these requests was that Ivey was superstitious. Ivey misrepresented his motive, intention and purpose and did not communicate the true reason for his requests to Borgata at any relevant time. Ivey’s true motive, intention, and purpose in negotiating these playing arrangements was to create a situation in which he could surreptitiously manipulate what he knew to be a defect in the playing cards in order to gain an unfair advantage over Borgata.”

Ivey is said to have won $2.4 million in one 16-hour session on April 16, 2012. Ivey then returned in May, July, and October of 2012, with his front money climbing to $3 million and the max bet doubling to $100,000 per hand.

The poker celebrity and his partner, Cheng Yin Sun, are alleged to have practiced “edge sorting” to, in effect, “mark” the cards by forcing the dealer to handle the cards in a way such that “the leading edges of the strategically important cards could be distinguished from the leading edges of the other cards in the deck.” This, the casino says, is why Ivey wanted to keep the same deck and the automatic shuffler, which would leave the orientation of the cards unchanged.

The “first card knowledge” changed the odds from a 1.06 percent “house advantage” to a 6.765 percent advantage for Ivey, the suit says.

If this all sounds familiar. Ivey is squabbling with a London casino, Crockfords, over a smilar amount from a similar alleged scheme involving a similar game.

The suit includes 12 counts against Ivey and Sun and six more against Gemaco.